The Arkansas Democratic Party was reduced to standing for nothing, but then, on Monday, it stood for something.
The party’s leadership issued a statement decrying that Republicans in the Legislature seem intent on passing Senate Bill 202 to prohibit cities and counties from having the authority to make their own laws against job discrimination.
But let’s not be euphemistic. We’re talking about Democrats choosing to stand up for gays and transgender people.
That’s a political loser for now in Arkansas. But it’s a generational winner. It attaches Arkansas Democrats to the long arc of history.
Someday Arkansas politics will catch up. Victory will be as sweet then for long-suffering Arkansas Democrats—and gays—as it is now for formerly long-suffering Arkansas Republicans—and anti-gay bigots.
For too long Arkansas Democrats have relied on euphemism, first to survive for election and then to try to salvage themselves after precipitous decline and obliteration.
Even last week, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola, an old Democratic hand, was questioning SB202 on technical grounds, not moral ones.
Euphemism gave Arkansas Democrats many decades of glory. It enabled them to distance themselves from their national party. It let them win elections on the trans-partisan and nonideological premise that they could govern effectively.
But now they can no longer escape their national party. And, for the moment, danged if it doesn’t appear these Republicans can govern.
So, for now, continued euphemism and evasion offer Arkansas Democrats little more than the very real threat of permanent minority status and utter irrelevance.
If you stand only for finding an evasive way to express yourself in a veiled way and thus to win, then you have nothing to fall back on when the jig is up.
And, believe me, for Democrats in Arkansas, the jig is quite up.
When you stand only for winning, then you don’t stand at all when you don’t win.
If you’re going to get beat—and Democrats are going to get beat, badly, for the time being in Arkansas—then you ought to get beat for a reason.
Let liberals be liberals. They can’t do a whole lot worse than Mark Pryor and Mike Ross.
Even now, with their statement Monday, state Democrats said they were standing for “local control.” But what they were really standing for was the right of a city or county to pass its own ordinance, as Fayetteville did briefly last year before reversal in a referendum, to prohibit discrimination in the workplace against homosexuals and transgender persons.
Republicans hate such local control. They believe gays and transgender persons darned well should be discriminated against, at work and everywhere else, and that no oddball town inhabited by concentrated liberals ought to be able to say otherwise.
But Republicans use a little of their own euphemism, saying such ordinances would unfairly regulate churches or harm economic development. That’s what the right-wing said in Fayetteville. A narrow voting majority agreed when the ordinance got referred to the voters.
But such ordinances would do neither—affect churches or hurt economic development.
Religious exceptions could be specified. Free religion would prevail anyway. And modern American employers—big ones, like Wal-Mart right there in Northwest Arkansas—already have their own policies prohibiting discrimination according to sexual orientation.
Such big companies, finding gay-tolerant policies essential in the changing world, will be loath to relocate to communities where people are on record preserving discrimination.
So there’s another euphemism available for Arkansas Democrats: SB202 would harm not only local control, but also, quite to the opposite of what Republicans say, economic development.
But that’s not the main point. The main point centers on whether we will abide discrimination against people owing to their sexual orientation.
We will abide it for now in Arkansas, tragically. It’s not our first tragedy.
But other places won’t abide it, and someday Arkansas, as ever, will stagger into the new era. And long-suffering Arkansas Democrats will have stood for short-term right and long-term triumph.
There will be quite a celebration.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.